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The 2000s Cartoon Network US site and Nitrome ( still alive but feels like a shell of its former glory ).
I know I can still play a lot of the old CN flash games on Flash Point, but it’s not as aesthetically satisfying as the old CN site.
As for Nitrome, I got a zip file that contained a lot of the games since they ain’t available on Flash Point and I don’t wanna use the modern site. The old games like Mutiny or IceBreakers are still kinda fun, even if games like Rubble Trouble, for some reason, don’t run well on my potato desktop under Ruffle.
Those were 2 of my favorite game sites in the 2000s, before I learned about NotDoppler.
Edit:
After looking at various comments, gonna say I remember the old Pencilmation series back when there was maybe a few different shorts on their website. Back when evil blue pen man was the big bad. Before they, or whatever copycat it was, started making tons of them on yt that are nothing but mass produced slop. Lived long enough to become a villain.
I also remembered an old PopTarts website with some dumb flash game about going down the red carpet without getting toasted and/or eaten ( IIRC ) that lead to me finding Pencilmation.
https://bill.newgrounds.com/news/post/1607118
Newgrounds bringing back flash.
Ones that aren’t a div mush mess. You see them rarely nowadays.
I mean, i agree, there are too much tags with ambiguous and overlapping definition. But c’mon, at least put the text in a <p>aragraph.
Gamewinners. While GameFaqs has largely taken over and a lot of games no longer offer actual built in cheat codes, GW was one of the best resources and even had cheats that aren’t on GF. Thank god archive.org still lets me browse GW
Also CMGSCCC which had soooooo many gameshark codes! It still kinda exists as codetwink now
Luckily they’re still active on YouTube!
The sites still up, but I don’t know if it gets updated.
I think I’m about 15 years behind on my SBEmails.
The email. The email. The what what? The email.
Everybody to the limit! Fhqwhgads!
it does! And they even had a new sbemail fairly recently! https://homestarrunner.com/sbemails/210-robots
Technically the website is still around. It just doesn’t have any of the fun interactive stuff now that Flash is defunct. It’s where they sell merch now.
I may be the proud owner of the Trogdor board game.
My daughter got me a Trogdor T shirt last Father’s Day. I usually get at least one reaction when I wear it in public.
It’s working again, through the power of Ruffle!
The could fucking convert their flash files into HTML5. There are tools that do it.
It’s still around, and a while ago had a cartoon about going back to a website!
AND at their website, which now uses Ruffle as its Flash player!
Unpopular opinion: Google?
Back before it sucked.
Honestly, yeah, my first thought is that I miss the Google and YouTube from 15 years ago
Searching for anything on YouTube now is a nightmare
It’s crazy that there is a whole generation of people who will never know how good google was at some point. You could find all the obscure shit. How often i just googled a serial number or some weird machinery to find parts, and people thought that i’m some sort of wizard. Try that now
A bit of the Google that was like that persists as the ‘web’ subsearch. The site at https://udm14.com/ exists purely as a frontend to that search. It’s not exactly like the old Google, it’s still too ready to throw Youtube videos at the top of the results, but it’s still much easier to find interesting websites that way than Google’s default search.
I guess I can say Homestar Runner and now the Homestar Runner Wiki.
As mentioned elsewhere Homestar Runner is still around and not doing badly. The Wiki, however, is severely starved for resources, it always takes a long long time to load for me.
I’m aware they’re still around. I appreciate that they only come out with something when they think it’s worth making (and have time to make it) rather than desperately trying to stay relevant. But the flash era enabled a kind of interactivity that I’m not sure is possible in these latter days of passive content consumption.
At the time, I thought this April fools’ video was their way of saying they wanted to wind things down. I also think Marzipan’s Answering Machine 17 was a brilliant way to celebrate the site, and I would have been happy if that was the last thing they ever made. (Also you know the OUYA screwed up if H*R is making fun of it).
But I do mourn the seemingly immanent loss of the wiki. I hope someone else can revive it. I think the TV Tropes article on H*R calls the wiki “disturbingly comprehensive”, and that’s an apt description. I used it to read the transcripts of new toons after watching them as there often visual gags I missed that the text would point out.
Stumbleupon
I still talk about the facts and sites I stumbled upon using it. For a very, very, short time old Reddit felt a bit like it.
lost so much time with that. just one more click before bed
Wasn’t this just a Firefox extension? But, yeah, I miss stumbling too.
It was a website first that would load stumbled sites in a frame while keeping their button to stumble visible. I never used the extension just the site.
I did both, loved them.
You could do anything on zombo.com.
All sites that have been expanded since then. They were lean and efficient.
ytmnd. Technically it still exists but the magic is gone
Ohhh yeah. You had to be there as part of the community in the early 2000s to really get the magic. It’s like LUE, SA, even /b/. I will forever look back fondly on my teenage shitposting days.
Neocities and just generally when it was cool for everyone to have their own personal website rather than having profiles on the major platforms.
Should be easier than ever today.
I think you meant geocities :)
Neocities still exists, and is doing great!
Sure! I don’t really care what people use, I’d just like to see more of it. It’s also on me to be part of the change I want to see, because I have my domain and everything, but I haven’t given myself the time to set up my site how I want.
Slashdot (still with us, but not the same)
Digg (back with us, but not the same)
Freshmeat
Kuro5hin
Slashdot was my fucking jam back in the day. I even met CmdrTaco once before I really even knew what Linux was.
I have to ask, is the software preservation 4am, who cracks the Apple II disks? If so then hooray, thanks for being so great!
Unfortunately not! But anyone who preserves Apple II disks is awesome in my book
MySpace and Facebook from before 2010. There’s not really any social media that’s designed to show me posts from my friends and nothing else. Now whenever I open up Facebook I am just shown shit from people and pages I never subscribed to and ads.
Agree. If only I could convince more of my friends to drop siloed socials and get fediverse accounts, I’d have a solution for that, but that’s not happening.
Unsanitized blogs where people just spilled out their thoughts. Overwhelmingly were they inconsequential, but it was still a funny little peek into the lives of people you’d never know. You can’t do that sort of thing as freely anymore, between doxxing, scraper swarms, and the abundance of lunatics online. The barrier to entry is higher and the risks greater.
These blogs do still exist, they just lack discoverability because they‘re not focusing on SEO. You might want to give Kagi Small Web a go. It‘s their explicit goal to promote these kinds of websites.
It‘s not quite the same as the good old days, but it‘s probably as close as we can get right now.
I supposed the alternative would be browsing i2p or freenet sites, pretty much nothing but weird small blogs, almost all of them focused on security and privacy tho
Second vote for kagi small web. One of my favorite feeds
They are still around and thriving. Keywords to search for are: personal web, small web, indie web
Yeah, it was interesting to read people’s unfiltered narcissism sometimes. Just pages and pages of journal entries about how they were a genius and their agonizing over every little social interaction and relationship in their life. That had zero traffic of commentary.
I never ever understood any of it. But it was scary to realize some people really do think of their life as a novel and they are the main character struggling to some liberation or something.
All my blogs were just random nonsense or short fictional pieces. I could never take the ‘dear diary’ stuff seriously.
Most of my friends would just post random funny links or talk about something they did that day and if it was cool or not. I never had the privilege of socializing with people who were writing autobiographical novels on the internet.
